Back again and a new challenge

I’m back, after a social media hiatus of about 8 weeks! I needed that, some time away, relaxing. The summer had a great start, some lazy weeks at home and some in the wonderful country of Norway. Summer ended with some downs unfortunately. For this reason, I took even more time away from the Internet than intended.

But now I’m ready for it all again, just in time to get going on art making and starting up all kinds of things. I’ll be teaching art again. And I’ll be blogging regularly too. There’s loads of stuff happening. Bear with me, I’ll tell the stories further down the line.

Fish challenge

Let me tell you one thing for now. I’m taking part in a new art challenge. Long time readers may remember earlier challenges, like ‘a year of daily creating’ (September 2014 until September 1st 2015). That was quite the challenge! Even before that, there was the bird challenge. That was three years ago. I mention the bird challenge because of a few similarities between the two challenges. First and most obvious, the fish challenge is like the bird challenge because we take on one theme, one subject matter. It’s three years since we started that challenge. That time we agreed on making birds. It was Kathrin Werner, Jill Kuhn and me at first. We all made lots of birds, explored techniques and material and saw our art skills grow.

For the fish challenge the idea is that we all make 50 pieces of art (any size, any materials) about fish between September 1st and October 30th. Draw, paint, collage – anything goes as far as technique and art supplies are concerned. For now there’s four participants. This time Kathrin and Jill started it. And there’s also HeideElise and me. I will share links to their blogs here as soon as possible. And anyone is welcome to join the challenge! We share online using a hashtag: #create50fish.

I made some artist trading cards for my first two installments. I had to be quick, as I was going out last night. I looked for my stash of backgrounds (originally meant for collages and mixed media pieces), picked out some beautiful green and blue pages. I also took out three letter size sheets of watercolor paper, and started decorating them with watercolor paper (and another set in progress).

Up above you see my first fish piece, a small piece : an artist trading card. The shape of the fish was inspired by the work of illustrator Mies van Hout, who created a book with wonderful fish. More on her work later perhaps.

I also started some in watercolor. Here’s one with charcoal pencil and colored pencil added.